Spice world: Unless you’re still making Alice B. Toklas’s brownies, saffron is the most expensive ingredient you can get in this country. (A certain fish eyeball that’s supposed to increase brain waves has fetched a few thousand in Japan, and beluga caviar that’s just been scraped out of the fish’s…
The next time you feel like complaining about how much you hate your job, consider this: In La Mancha, Spain, hundreds of people spend their eight hours a day hunched over, painstakingly plucking stigmas from Crocus sativus flowers one teeny, precious thread at a time. It takes about two weeks…
No matter how good a meal is, it’s hard to enjoy it when you’re eating in your overcoat. During a recent dinner at India Palace, the modest dining room was so chilly that my frozen fingers could barely hold on to a fork. Although it was sixteen degrees out that…
Say cheese: Because of Indian cooking’s vegetarian focus–not to mention India’s reverence for cows–dairy products are a big part of the Indian diet, with yogurt, homemade cheese and the clarified butter ghee supplying a major portion of protein. The cheese chenna, made from boiled, curdled milk, and the pressed version,…
When the Mongolian hordes–you know, those guys led by Genghis and Kublai and Chaka and all those other Khans–took a break from a hard day’s fight, they liked to relax over a steaming helmetful of on-the-roadkill stew. This haphazard cuisine would not seem the stuff that restaurant dynasties are made…
Fit to be stir-fried: Although your kitchen isn’t equipped with the sort of young, entertaining grillers who keep things cooking at BD’s Mongolian Barbeque (reviewed above), it has other stir-fry advantages. You can easily duplicate the ingredients offered at BD’s, since they’re your basic cut vegetables, sliced meats and chopped…
Our daily bread: Although I haven’t seen capirotada on any menus in town besides La Loma’s (see review above), this Lenten bread pudding has been around at least since seventh-century prophet Mohammed, according to Western food historian Sam Arnold, who owns The Fort restaurant in Morrison. In his book Eating…
It’s taken five years and hundreds of meals, but I think I’m finally starting to understand Denver’s obsession with Mexican food. When it’s good, it can be very, very good (although when it’s bad, it’s horrid)–and it doesn’t get any better than at La Loma. But then, this restaurant has…
In 1998, the face of Denver dining changed from the wizened old visage of the familiar to the crazed, cash-hungry smirk of the young upstarts. While most of the restaurants the town lost were newer models, few of the disappearances came from links in chains. Although many old-timers are still…
Walking into Paul’s Creekside Grill at the Inn at Silver Creek was a little like opening a gift wrapped in the funny pages and tied with a shoelace. The package was cute, but I didn’t have high hopes for what might be inside. But despite the strange setup, Paul’s is…
Soup’s on: There may not be much snow up in them thar hills, but things are still cookin’ at Silver Creek Ski Resort–and they’ll continue to as long as Seth Daugherty is in the kitchen at Paul’s Creekside Grill (see review above). Daugherty’s dishes are so delicious that it was…
A century ago, Mattie Silks was Denver’s most notorious madam. And so I approached my first meal at the restaurant that occupies her expensively refurbished Victorian brothel, Mattie’s House of Mirrors, with some trepidation. Like its namesake, was this establishment out to screw us? After all, in keeping with Silks’s…
Noodlin’ around: One indicator of an excellent chef is his ability to take simple ingredients and combine them in a way that makes the most of their attributes. At Mattie’s House of Mirrors (see review above), one of the most flavorful and well-proportioned dishes is the capellini with four tomatoes,…
Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah: The food served on the Great Northern Railway was very different from the food served at its namesake in Denver, the Great Northern Tavern (see review above). The railroad received so many requests for its recipes that it put out a thirty-page booklet called…
Have a successful eatery? Hey, open another one. No matter that you can’t clone the location, the chef or the waitstaff, much less yourself. If your concept works in one place, it’s bound to work everywhere, right? Wrong. Very wrong. The original Great Northern Tavern is in Keystone, where residents…
Made in America: The Manor House (reviewed above) would be wise to skip the fusion and instead focus on classic American cooking–and I’m not talking dry turkey and mashed potatoes from a box (have you polished off your leftovers yet?). For some great American recipes, check out the U.S.A. Cookbook…
At a place named The Manor House, you expect to eat something grand. Especially when the restaurant is housed in a true manor house, a 1914 American-Georgian-Southern-style mansion nestled snugly against the stately, shrub-lumpy bosom of the Ken Caryl Valley. This was once the centerpiece of a 28,000-acre estate owned…
Say cheese: If there’s a food in the world that I love more than cheese, I don’t know what it could be. Yes, foie gras is fabulous and truffles are divine, but I can’t afford to eat them every day–and I’m not sure I’d want to. Cheese, however, I ingest…
I’m now at the point where I let food magazines–Saveur, Food & Wine, Gourmet–pile up in the corner, unopened. Because if I grab one and start digesting those stories about fabulous food in other cities, I bawl like a baby. Read it and weep: In New York, Jean Georges is…
Chicken feed: One of my favorite dishes at Pagliacci’s was the chicken cacciatore. Alla cacciatora means “cooked in the hunter’s style”; in the Italy of old, the dish was most often made with rabbit and whatever proportions of tomatoes, olive oil, garlic and onions the family’s nonna favored. No matter…
More than fifty years ago, Sicilian immigrant Frank Grandinetti opened Pagliacci’s in what was then an Italian neighborhood in northwest Denver. “The restaurant was born out of this love between Frank and his wife, Thelma,” says Rose Ann Langston, the Grandinettis’ niece and Pagliacci’s current owner and manager. “In fact,…
The food chain that matters is not about who’s eating whom, but who’s cooking what–and where. The right chef, one with training and firsthand knowledge of the country where the cuisine originated, can make all the difference at a restaurant. So, of course, can the wrong chef. At Samurai, once…
